That is the Advanced Revolution Analytics R Integration, as SQL Server R Service within SQL Server 2016. “R” is the most popular programming language for Advanced Analytics. You can use it to analyze data, uncover patterns and trends and build predictive models. It offers an incredibly rich set of packages and a vibrant and fast-growing developer community.

While installing SQL Server 2016, you will get an option to integrate R, it mentions “Includes Advanced Analytics Extensions that enables integration with R language using standard T-SQL statements.”, as shown below:

Post installation you need to go thru these steps to configure “R” with SQL Server, [link].

–> Another major feature is “Transactional Replication from SQL Server to Azure SQL DB”

Now you can setup Azure SQL DB as a subscriber of transaction replication, allowing you to migrate data from SQL Server instance on-premises or in IaaS to Azure SQL database without downtime.

–> With this release SQL Server team has added and improved lot of new features. Some of the important Enhancements and Issues fixed in this release are:

– SSIS control flow template enables customers to save a commonly used control flow task or container to a standalone template file and reuse it multiple times in a package or multiple packages in a project.